The shortest century and the greatest party

February 16 2003By Adrian Collette

Do you know who wrote the first Rolling Stones' hit single? It was those fresh-faced lads from Liverpool, John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

The Beatles, who at the time were "the avatars of a re-emergent England - sleek and triumphant and safe for the kiddies and grandma", fuelled their "dark doppelgangers", the Stones. The "nice" Beatles were working-class lads from Liverpool whose genius kept revolutionising popular culture. The subversive Mick Jagger, on the other hand, was a suburban boy with a bourgeois upbringing who was enrolled at the London School of Economics. Things were not as they seemed.

Ready, Steady, Go!, Shawn Levy's heady account of an even headier time, gets us out of the starting blocks fast and still manages to accelerate through 300 pages of part social history, part philosophy, part satire and part biography. He creates a fizzing cocktail of impulsive innocence and worldly calculation that makes you re-live an explosion of popular cultural entrepreneurship, when "London rose from a prim and fusty capital to the fashionable centre of the modern world ... London was where youth culture finally cemented its hold on all forms of expression, and made itself loudly and exuberantly known".

It was a vital time built on optimism, as working-class lads and lasses found voice through music, photography, screen stardom, fashion and the invention of modern entrepreneurship. They also began to fascinate and seduce the ruling aristocracy. Or did they? If the "new century started in 1960", then perhaps it ended in 1970, as the optimistic youth culture slid into a drug-induced, narcissistic oblivion.

In accounting for the life of the times, Levy focuses on seven characters: David Bailey (the snapper), Terence Stamp (the dreamer), Brian Epstein (the loner), Mary Quant (the draper), Vidal Sassoon (the crimper), Mick Jagger (the chameleon), and Robert Fraser (the blue blood). This biographical intricacy also provides Levy with an endless repertoire of well-researched gossip. ");document.write("

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After the grey conservatism of the '50s, we see a few tentative steps in England towards sexual liberation. Stamp ventured on a protracted courtship of the most beautiful face in the world, that of Jean Shrimpton, who belonged at the time to Bailey, the trendy young photographer who had discovered her and promoted her to the world. Stamp succeeded in his quest, so Bailey moved on to a promising young French actress, Catherine Deneuve. By the end of the '60s such courtship rituals, inspired by the availability of the contraceptive pill and lubricated by the availability of narcotics, turned into a spaghetti of barely traceable sexual liaisons.

More seriously, Levy argues in his conclusion that by the end of the Swinging Sixties, liberation was complete and its influence was far-reaching: "There was the sense that social wrongs could not stand: racial, sexual and class oppression, bullying, warfare, unchecked savaging of the environment. In England during the Swinging London years, homosexuality was decriminalised, capital punishment banned, divorce laws reformed and censorship of the arts curtailed ... Nothing of the modern world we share could have been the way it is without those years in London."

But the sudden force of liberation created its victims. Stamp, the beautiful working-class lad who shot to stardom in Peter Ustinov's film, Billy Budd, could never quite find his creative feet and headed off to India at the end of the decade for a protracted period of introspection. Fraser, the blue-blood gallery owner who revolutionised taste through his flamboyant gallery, was busted for possession of heroin, did six months in Wormwood Scrubs, vented his homosexual craving while incarcerated and died all too prophetically of AIDS. The "fifth Beatle", the genius entrepreneur of his generation, Brian Epstein, the real "Nowhere Man" of the eponymous song, slipped unassumingly away on a barbituric nightcap. Liberation came at a hell of a price.

Others, of course, fared better: Mary Quant and Vidal Sassoon built two kinds of fashion dynasties. Bailey kept documenting the times. As for Sir Mick? He kept shedding his adaptive skins, "always the cautious one, adopting the guise of daring but staying well away from the edge of danger".

Australia rates four mentions: the Beatles toured here; Marianne Faithfull tried to commit suicide here; the "Shrimp" invented the mini-skirt here by shocking the good citizens of Melbourne at our most famous racing carnival; and Richard Neville managed to get himself prosecuted in London for his savagely satirical and "obscene" publication, Oz.

It was, says Levy "the greatest party the world has ever known". It induced a massive hangover that has lasted for decades.